Senior Developer - Ministry of Justice - G7

Manchester Digital; Manchester; On-site; GBP 60,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

Justice Digital, Data and Science is recruiting a Senior WordPress/PHP Developer to join the Website Builder Platform Team. The role aligns with the Senior Developer specification from the Government Digital and Data Framework, and you will mentor peers while contributing to cross-team projects.

Expect to work across WordPress themes/plugins, modern CI/CD with GitHub Actions, and cloud-native services on AWS.

Qualifications

• Demonstrate proven experience of delivering large and complex software solutions.
• Building and maintaining WordPress themes and plugins.
• Apply modern development and deployment techniques to your work, including continuous integration and continuous delivery.
• Champion software maintenance, clean code, coding standards and practices that make change and consistency easier.
• Write automated tests to continuously validate your work.
• Work effectively within multi-disciplinary teams, demonstrating a commitment to agile software development and knowledge sharing.
• Hold yourself and others to a high standard.
• Solve problems in a systematic way.

Responsibilities

• Coach and mentor junior colleagues and take part in informal support networks with peers.
• Play an active role in the engineering community and culture.
• Work with other developers on the tech stack and learn new technologies and systems.
• Be open to transitioning between teams or departments to learn different technologies or take on more responsibility.

Skills

WordPress/PHP

React JS

CSS/HTML

WordPress themes/plugins

Full Site Editor

AWS

Docker

Kubernetes

GitHub Actions

Tools

WordPress

React JS

Docker

Kubernetes

AWS

GitHub Actions

Job description

Location

East Midlands (England), East of England, London (region), North East England, North West England, Scotland, South East England, South West England, Wales, West Midlands (England), Yorkshire and the Humber

The Role

Please note this role requires you to pass Security Check clearance. Please click on the link for details.

We’re recruiting for a Senior WordPress/PHP Developer here at Justice Digital, Data and Science to be part of our warm and collaborative Website Builder Platform Team.

This role is aligned with the specification of Senior Developer from the Government Digital and Data Framework.

We currently have over 200 experienced developers who make up the engineering community across the MoJ. You will coach and mentor junior colleagues and take part in informal support networks with your peers. You will be encouraged to play an active role in the engineering community and culture.

You’ll be confident working with other developers on our tech stack and comfortable learning new technologies and systems. We use a variety of different technologies and will work with you to place you in a team that matches your skills, interests, and aspirations wherever possible.

We take responsibility for supportive and effective line management very seriously. We will value the skills you bring to the civil service and help you build on them. When the time is right, we will support moving between teams or government departments to learn different technologies, or take on more responsibility, according to your career goals.

Our Tech Stack

We use a range of technologies and we’re looking for people who have experience of building web applications or back-end systems in an object-oriented language, and love learning new languages and frameworks.

We use WordPress/PHP and React JS to write our application code, GitHub Actions for CI/CD, Sentry for application monitoring, Kubernetes and Docker to schedule and run our services (read about our Cloud Platform), AWS for most of our infrastructure and use a MacOS developer environment.

For front-end development, we value a robust understanding of the underlying web technologies. We value well-maintained, open-source tools that can be used to produce semantic HTML, performant CSS and unobtrusive JavaScript and we assess all our services against accessibility criteria.

Check out GitHub for a closer look at the technologies we use, and a complete list of services that we build and maintain. We subscribe to the manifesto for agile software development.

Technical

• Expert knowledge of WordPress/PHP and React JS programming languages, CSS/HTML
• Experience in building and maintaining WordPress themes and plugins.
• Experience building and development WordPress Full Site Editor features.
• Experience in working with the WordPress full site editor
• Building WordPress blocks from scratch.
• Version Control and GitActions
• Building and working with microservices using containerization (Docker)
• Revise, refactor, update, and debug code
• Collaborate with internal teams to design, create and maintain software
• Knowledge of AWS architecture, tools and resources

Non-Technical

• Attention to detail
• Strong verbal and oral communication skills
• Time management and organisational skills
• The ability to work independently or as part of a team

People

• Developing and influencing people via line management duties, informal and formal coaching and mentoring
• Supporting lead developers in building high performing teams
• Helping to build and maintain a diverse, inclusive culture across the development community, growing awareness, inclusivity and balance

Person Specification

Essential

• Demonstrate proven experience of delivering large and complex software solutions
• Building and maintaining WordPress themes and plugins
• Apply modern development and deployment techniques to your work, including continuous integration and continuous delivery
• Champion software maintenance, clean code, coding standards and practices that make change and consistency easier
• Write automated tests to continuously validate your work
• Work effectively within multi-disciplinary teams, demonstrating a commitment to the principles of agile software development and fostering a culture of knowledge sharing and continuous improvement.
• Hold yourself and others to a high standard
• Solve problems in a systematic way

Willingness to be assessed against the requirements for SC clearance